Relaunching your website? Don’t forget an SEO audit!

One of the biggest mistakes we see is the redesign process. Updating your website’s design is a great idea! However, it’s critical that you don’t damage the existing foundation in the process. Some of the most overlooked (and detrimental) items we see get looked over include:

Changing URL structure

Deleted pages (with no redirects)

WordPress blocking the site from being indexed

Overzealous content consolidation

And the list goes on. To help make sure you don’t fall into these traps we found a helpful post by Janet Driscoll Miller recently published at Search Engine Land.

“What do we need to know, Janet?”

So you’re going to redesign and relaunch your website. Congratulations! That’s certainly a major undertaking. But before your relaunch is live, you may want to perform an SEO audit, just to be safe. A proper SEO audit identifies potential SEO pitfalls prior to launch, giving you time to get issues fixed before you replace your current website.

Unlike a general SEO audit on your website, an audit for a relaunching site is a bit of a different animal because you’re looking at and comparing two different sites: the old site versus the newly designed site. Relaunch audits also come with their own set of challenges.

Many of the tools used to perform an audit require a website to be accessible on the web to scan the site, but when you’re doing a redesign, the new website may be hidden behind password-protected gates or may be on an internal server, inaccessible to these tools.

When performing a relaunch audit, I break it down into two main pieces: pre-launch and post-launch.